PS: Question:

[beccaelizabeth]

Why do people keep calling Gwen the audience identification figure anyway?




We're an audience of SF viewers, we know the 'verse since we were little kids albeit from a different angle, and she's surprised by that whole genre. We usually know more than her (irony alert). She's not us.

Mostly people on my poll wanted to be Tosh anyways.

Comments

[melina123.livejournal.com]

I would guess that for one thing, the whole audience of Torchwood is not "us" -- hardcore fannish types. There are people who watch such shows casually. Torchwood also seems designed to be specifically accessible to people who 1) like adult-oriented, urban-drama type shows that aren't specifically genre and 2) don't have prior knowledge of Doctor Who.

I'd also guess it's simply because she's the outsider, the new girl, the one looking at Torchwood without the jaded eyes of experience. She's the one who asks questions an outsider might ask, like isn't it totally wrong for Torchwood to have everyone's medical records? To be able to cover up deaths? To make life and death decisions about people like Carys and Jasmine? She's the one going through the experience of having all of this knowledge hit her like a lead brick, and figuring out how it's going to impact her own life.

She may not be the character that feels most personally identifiable to genre fans, but yeah, I do think it's pretty fair to call her the stand-in for the audience as a broad whole.

[beccaelizabeth]

(The concept of being British and without prior knowledge of Doctor Who is one I have trouble making fit in my head :-) )

these things make sense

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

There's the reasonable suggestion(s) like the poster above.

Or there's the reason that someone thought that Gwen was the POV charecter for the first episode(s), and concluded that she was the POV charecter for the rest of the show as well. And then the meme just propagated though out the Torchwood fandom.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods*

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I don't think it has to do with familiarity with genre conventions. The fact that Gwen starts outside Torchwood is a point of identification even with hardcore SF fans.

We're not outside the government, we answer to our bosses, we don't do whatever we feel like--in short, we're not moral supermen. And neither is Gwen at the start of the series. Through Gwen, we can be corrupted alongside by Torchwood, feeling its allure (shiny!) and whatnot.

[beccaelizabeth]

makes sense

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I'd love to be Tosh but the one I identify with - and react to as the viewpoint whenever possible - is Jack.

I rather like Owen as viewpoint too. He is so 'other', so far from anything I can identify with, that his viewpoint is always particularly interesting.

I don't have nearly as much sense of Ianto's viewpoint, from a cinematic point of view. This is okay, but it makes him... elusive.

[beccaelizabeth]

Jack is such a mystery in some ways it seems tricky to try and see through him. I mean, he's the shiny hero guy so often I pretty much want to be him, but then he seems to have more trauma than Ianto, which takes *work*, and sounds less fun.

Yet Jack is the only one I wear on icons.

Yeah, every character had it's want-to-be voters. Is cool.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Jack is such a mystery in some ways it seems tricky to try and see through him.

I feel I have such a sense of his personality - both the core personality and the layers of persona he has constructed around that - that I can relate to him in any number of situations and reactions, even if I don't know the details of his life - like what has happened to him since Satellite Five, and how long ago that was. So while I don't know the most of the events of his past, I know the personality that went through it. I find Jack... easy.

he seems to have more trauma than Ianto

Ianto has had trauma (Canary Wharf) and hearbreak (Lisa). Other than that he seems to have lived a normal enough life, and only about 25 years of such in one timeline. Ianto, for all he's a Torchwood boy, has had an extremely normal life compared to Jack - who, if we believe him, went through the kind of trauma Ianto has had when he was a young teenager. (I'm guessing he was about 14 or 15 when he went to war.) This adds to Jack's complexity which, for me, is part of the fun. Especially when the core-Jack is always consistent and rather sweet.

[justhuman.livejournal.com]

*nods to the posters above*

It's also about whose shoes the audiance feels they could step into, which is different from who they might want to step into. Gwen starts off with an ordinary job and then lands an extraordinary job and is often shown feeling like she's in over her head. She has a tough time balancing out homelife and work. She doesn't have any very special skills. Everyone else in Torchwood has some above average ability and/or knowledge.

In his commentary for Welcome to the Hellmouth he pointed out that Willow and Xander were the audiance pov characters - the average high school kid who was not a football star or cheerleader. As they helped on Buffy's adventures they were to stand in for those of us without slayer powers. Joss knew right off that people were going to have a hard time relating to Buffy and thus the useful sidekicks.

Farscape is easy with John who steps into something completely outside his element and fights constantly to be understood.

Early Angel had Wesley and Cordelia to be the contrasts to Mr. Broody. Later on, Joss tried to force Fred on us as the pov character as Wes, Gunn and Cordy became more savvy.

[beccaelizabeth]

Farscape-John is about as exceptional as humans get, though, so the 'could' part is a bit lacking... mind you, media fan, quotes under pressure, gives more of a point of contact.

*thinks thoughts*
*thanks*

[justhuman.livejournal.com]

Farscape-John is about as exceptional as humans get, though

Which doesn't matter because in the context of the Farscape universe, all humans are adolescent neanderthals. None of his senses measure up to the alien species. He doesn't have any special weapons ability, he isn't hundreds of years old. He's a kid playing an adult's game, always struggling to catch up. The fact that he's an exceptional human makes us cling to him more because we would be that much more lost in the situation that he's thrown into.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods*

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

I don't think Fred is the audience PoV character in AtS except maybe in the few largely Fred-centric episodes or parts of episodes. Looking at the series, I don't think there really is an audience PoV character in AtS in that sense - it seems to be a third-person PoV biased towards Angel himself.

[justhuman.livejournal.com]

I think that Wes and Cordy were povs in S1 and that during S2, they lost their status as the show shifted giving them more confidence in power. I don't think that Fred became the POV character, but I do think that Joss wanted her to be.

Fred has to be one of the most unevenly written characters in the verse. The backstage meta says that many of the writers loathed the character's inclusion in S3 where we see some of the worst handling. Note: this was not anything against Amy, but the new intruding character. Joss on the other hand loved her and everytime he stepped in to write a script, Fred became more loveable, sweet and human -- as opposed to the door stop that most of the other writers tended to ignor. This changed when Joss hired some female writers that tried to give Fred a bit more 3 dimensionality. However, the dimensions they tried to give Fred didn't jive completely with Joss' vision of Fred.

The ultimate expression of Joss trying to force Fred as the POV was A Hole in the World *spit*. The audiance was supposed to care that Fred was dying and be 1000% behind the great quest to save her and think that it was right and just that *every freaking character loved/was in love with Fred*. It was a lousy episode because they never did establish Fred as the pov. What worked much better was the follow-on episode, Shells - not written by Joss, that showed the more human reactions of the cast to losing something important to them. Specifically, Wesley's grief reconnected us with the characters, who by the end of S5 were drifting away from us.